Video SEO and WordPress

I’ve been testing a lot with video SEO lately, and I’ll be doing a whole lot more of that testing, as video SEO seems to be a nice area to play in. Now I noticed my buddy Mark Robertson over at ReelSEO did a short, but nice interview with Matt Cutts on video sitemaps:

Now you’re probably asking: what on earth’s name does this stuff about video SEO have to do with WordPress? Well, it’s quite simple: one of my upcoming WordPress SEO plugin’s features will be to automatically generate video sitemaps, for video’s added with several supported video plugins, like the awesome Viper’s Video Quicktags.

So, for a preview of what will be able to do, check out my video sitemap, and try and search for some of the terms in there, you’ll see my video’s have started ranking nicely. There’s a lot of voodoo involved and this needs a lot more testing, so don’t expect this out tomorrow, but it is possible, and it will be available within a few (I’d say 2-3) months.

Post author: Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk is the owner and creator of Yoast.com. He's a WordPress / Web developer, SEO & and an Open Source fanatic.
He's also (and more importantly) the father of two sons called Tycho and Ravi, a daughter called Wende and the husband of a lovely wife called Marieke. Read all about Joost »

42 Responses

Just a head’s up — I’m currently working on v7.0 of my plugin. It’ll be a total rewrite and while it will still support the [youtube]-style of embedding, I’ll be overall moving towards using the native embeds feature. My plugin will enhance and clean up the result of the oEmbed request and customize it to your needs.

In short, my plugin will handle URL-on-it’s-own-line style, [embed] style (this will likely be the recommended method), and the classic (deprecated maybe?) [youtube] site specific shortcodes.

If you want an alpha build to play with, shoot me and e-mail and I’ll send it your way. :)

I was under the impression that in order to have a video sitemap you had to host the videos in your own server, however, I can see that you have your videos in youtube and reference their location in your site via your videos sitemap, am I right? thank you in advance

Sorry for the linky? I’m reading about that right now and realize its not the right way… not sure what the right way is yet!!! Getting great search results anyway, but I hear that linking is actually like 2/3 of your seo? How can that be when I’m terrible with it and still have good results!!!

I’m afraid that it’s not going to be free, though it is going to be GPL, but I can’t do free for a plugin this big (it’s more code already then all my other plugins combined), and still maintain it properly.

Your SEO plugin sounds very great Joost. I have several hundred videos on my website, so an automatically generated video sitemap would be a huge help to me. (If you need beta testers I would be happy to assist you).

However I noticed you said it works with several video plugins such as “Viper’s Video Quicktags”. What if we don’t use video plugins but rather do things manually with embed code. I use the popular “JW Player” flash player along with a custom field “video” which has just the video filename (that way I can easily update the flash player dimensions/style across all videos at once for example). Hopefully your plugin would still be able to work on a setup like this?

Hi Sean, sounds like an interesting idea to support that. Some questions though: if you only link to a video file in the meta of your page, you do not create a “poster” or “thumbnail” image? (A sitemap can work without it, so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem, but it does mean you can’t optimize the click through ratio…)

Yes, I do indeed use poster image (a custom field “image” which I forgot to mention in my comment). Also my videos are hosted on a external server/CDN (Amazon S3) which I’m sure is fairly common amongst video sites. So that is another thing to think about…

Hopefully you are able to support JW Player for this plugin since it’s one of the most popular flash players. Thanks for looking into it!

@yoast Thanks for the responses. I ended up doing a Google search for joost [thinking I am searching for Yoast]and went to the video site and thought ‘oh my God, that sneak Yoast has transformed his site into a video site to exploit his new plugin and get ahead of the game’ lol.

I am keen to pay now whilst in beta and build a custom site on thesis and a new skin dedicated to tech stuff and video. i think it will be an excellent example of the use of this plugin and a real demo that you can use that will be outstanding.

I do not want to wait 2/3 months and I would rather not use the paid one I have now since it does not support 3rd party sharing sites which would be a hugh disadvantage for traffic at a site like youtube.

Joost, I’m really glad you’re focusing on video sitemaps. As you work on your plugin, do you think it’d make sense to have it either integrate with the Google XML sitemaps plugin OR totally replace that plugin? [Totally replacing is probably easier.]

At the moment, most of us are stuck with adding videos to the generated sitemap manually.

Fabulous! Once again . . .something I hadn’t thought about needing that I need to do. Probably need a very long list for each wordpress site I build or coach. Thanks for sharing. Video is the wave of the future.

As a company that creates IT Certification Training videos, this sounds like it’s going to be a GREAT plugin. You really do some amazing work, thanks for all your contributions to the WordPress community!

If you need people to test the plugin, please let me know, I’d be glad to be an additional beta tester..

Sweet! As with @Dave above, I too, am a video producer and I’ve been researching video sitemaps and looking to integrate it into my website relaunch that will include plenty of original video. As always, good news from Joost!

My guess is that that’ll take a while. At one point they’ll be able to do it, but whether they’ll have the processing power anytime soon to do that for all video on, for instance, youtube, is something entirely different.

Trackbacks

[…] video sitemap path yet, I did want to at least share a short post by Joost de Valk entitled “Video SEO and WordPress“. One reference Joost shares is Creating a Video Sitemap, located on Google’s Webmaster […]